Secrets with the power to destroy: Exposure review

IT IS November 1960 and almost ten years since Burgess and Maclean were exposed and vanished to the Soviet Union.

Exposure: The individual up against authority and the survival of love against the odds

Tensions continue to run high and there are still Soviet operatives at the heart of the Admiralty and the British Establishment. One is the buffoonish, alcoholic Giles Holloway, clearly modelled on Guy Burgess.

He has become careless, taking home secret documents to his hidden attic to photograph them for the Russians. In a drunken haze, he falls downstairs, breaks his leg badly and is hospitalised for weeks. He urgently needs someone to return a document to the Admiralty and he thinks of a former lover, Simon Callington.

But Simon is now married with three young children and he hesitates about what to do, knowing that Holloway’s request will land him and his family in great danger.

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As a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, his wife Lily also has secrets and her own deep-seated fears. Arriving in England as a child in the 1930s, she was schooled by her mother never to speak German and has now all but forgotten her native language, her foreign intonation only appearing in moments of crisis.

And there are plenty of those in the book. When Simon is arrested, she is cross-questioned in German, although she understands nothing of what of her interrogator is saying. Having believed that Britain was a safe haven, she suddenly finds herself up against the same predatory state powers she thought she had escaped when she fled Germany.

Dunmore is a prolific novelist who has written often about conflict. Her first novel, Zennor In Darkness, explored events leading to D H Lawrence’s expulsion from Cornwall on suspicion of spying after the First World War (he had a German wife).

Her magnum opus must surely be The Siege, an extraordinary book about the Siege of Leningrad. A follow-up, The Betrayal, featured many of the same characters trying to survive the perils of Stalinism after the Second World War.

Exposure is a smaller scale novel than an epic such as The Siege but the themes remain the same: the individual up against authority and the survival of love against the odds. Dunmore evokes the greyness of 1960s London, still overshadowed by war, and the scrimping and saving of housewives to make ends meet.

Told throughout in the present tense, the novel is a family story and a spine-tingling thriller.